


Fait Accompli

by callmecathy



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: (Resolved angst), Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, get-together, pre-season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 06:24:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2378138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmecathy/pseuds/callmecathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You and I need to come to an accord, Harold."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fait Accompli

The rain follows them into the taxi.

Reese pulls the door shut; the chill and the moisture and the traffic noises cut off abruptly. In the quiet Reese's breathing sounds rough, Finch's ragged, and from the front the radio chitters with voices and static.

"Where to?"

Reese gives the driver an address.

"Is that really wise?" Finch asks quietly. He's wan, hollowed out under the ruthless light of streetlights; for a second his eyes close. Reese crowds him instantly, grips his shoulders, runs his hands along his sides, down his arms, through the bristle of hair at the back of his head. His fingers come away damp, it's impossible to tell with what.

"Okay?" Reese asks. His voice sounds rough, too. Finch is shaking his head tightly. "Finch?"

His eyes tip open. He reaches up, palms the side of Reese's neck in a movement so intent Reese doesn't have time to be surprised. "Okay," he repeats, "I'm--"

"-- _explosions heard near the east side of Queens earlier this evening. Confirmed eye-witness accounts sighted two unidentified men fleeing the scene. Officials are asking the public for any information regarding the men--"_

Reese whips back around. The driver's eyes are hooded beneath his cap and fixed on him in the reflection of the mirror; he forces a smile. It feels as unconvincing as it is false, and he used to be better at this, back before the Agency taught him how to lie. (And the lie is obvious this time, with the dampness of his suit drawing out the smell of asphalt and smoke and rubble.)

The rain's turned to a blanketing mist, blurring the world outside. It doesn't blot out the flash of siren lights as two patrol cars swing around the corner, though; it doesn't hide the outline of HR's men as they slide out, either.

The driver's stare seesaws between the radio and the (corrupt) cops.

Reese's knuckles brush his gun.

"Aren't the Mets playing tonight?"

Finch, though: Finch was taught by no agency. But he's good, more innocuous than Reese could ever seem in a ragged suit at 2 O'clock in the morning on a Thursday, all finesse as he indicates the driver's Mets cap, presses him for the score.

The driver obligingly switches the channel: a play's called. Under the buzz of the radio's announcer, gutter water sluices the cab as it pulls from the curb.

Without ever looking at him, Finch's fingers crumple in Reese's coat lapels and drag down. Reese follows the motion through until he's slid low into the seat.

Flickers of red and blue lash through the car, along the figures of HR's men. In tandem Reese and Finch turn their heads away, towards each other-- the windows are blurry with rain, Reese knows, and taxis are a dime a dozen in this city, and Finch's eyes are wide and if they are stopped Reese will reverse their grips and shove Finch down, out of the line of fire--

The cab glides past.

Finch's grip loosens on Reese's coat.

Reese feels the energy go out of Finch's body when he sags, hand slipping down Reese's front. His breath shakes audibly. Before Finch can fully ease off he catches his arm, grazes his wrist with his fingertips and is met with a strong, skating pulse beneath.

He can't check Finch over properly, not with the taxi driver's suspecting gaze drifting intermittently towards Reese, and he can't tell if Finch's injured under the fleeting street lights, but he can do this.

 

When the cab comes to a stop, Reese has to rouse him.

He's not sleeping, he wouldn't, no matter how exhausted he were, but when he looks up he shakes himself a little, as if waking.

"Why are we--? Yes, of course." He digs around in his pockets, an incredulous line forming there at the edge of his mouth when he comes up short.

"I've got it." He tips the driver extra.

It's six blocks back to the Library and Finch is in pain.

To the untrained eye-- basically, to someone who doesn't know him-- it isn't obvious. But Reese does know him, and it is obvious in the shallow ginger breaths he takes and the stillness of his hands; it's there in his measured steps as he keeps his weight shifted from his bad leg.

They've been running. On the move for an hour straight and no way to stop, not with HR behind and the clean cops ahead, and evidence of their guilt thirty feet high in the sky from the veritable smoke trail they'd left in their wake.

If Reese used to be a better liar then he certainly used to be more subtle, too.

Four blocks in and the mist is a permeating, enveloping thing: it's hard to make anything out, let alone Finch-- nothing but the line of his coat and the hand he has pressed to his leg. He catches Reese watching, twice.

"I'll be fine," he says on a low, flagging breath, and if Reese used to be better at subtlety, no one'd know it from today.

 

The Library is pitch dark at first. Gives way, after a minute, to grey-blur shapes and the bone-white of what must be pages; in the gloom, the familiar smells of must and dust and weathered wood are infinitely more acute. (So is the clean precision of Finch's aftershave, faint but there, and it is even more familiar than must and dust and weathered wood.)

His foot spins out on something slick when he takes a step-- paper, maybe-- and he catches himself on what he thinks is an upturned bookcase.

He lost his penlight the same time as his car. He doesn't even have a lighter. Reese used to be subtle and he used to be a decent liar but he must've never really been a good spy. Because any good spy knows better than to go to ground without the proper resources, or at least someplace that has them-- and any good spy knows the one place people running always go to ground to.

Reese suspects that the Library might be home, if only because nothing else is.

"The stairs are--" Finch starts.

"No," he interrupts, "the elevator."

It's testament to how exhausted he is that he doesn't even produce a token protest. Reese takes another blind step forward, only to stop at the hand on his arm. He lets Finch lead. Finch knows this place better than he, and even in the dark Reese trusts him with an absoluteness that can't be anything but instinct.

Once in the elevator, Reese runs his hands along the wall till he feels the button panel; behind him, Finch tugs the metal-grated doors closed.

The lift rises. Air shifts, displaced lazily, as cracks between the stonework slide by like an old film reel. Reese prefers to avoid the elevator when he can. Better to chance death with a gunshot than this slow ascent into encasing stone, the cabling's death creak.

Finch is a tangible presence at his back.

They're not quite touching, but they're close enough for Reese to remember when they had: Finch, palming his neck in the taxi, grasping his elbow on the first floor. But Finch-- Finch doesn't initiate touch. Not when he doesn't have to. It's in the rules.

The elevator rattles to a stop.

Windows line the hallway of the third floor. Scattered light is coming through, hatches of moonlight and the lurch of headlight beams as they pass; it's enough to make out the sitting area.

Outside, voices pitch and fall. Reese peers out cracked windows. No sign they've been followed, nothing save a few stragglers and slick reflective streets-- and sirens wailing in the distance.

He turns. "You're alright?"

"Well," Finch says, one hand groping out for the sofa and another pressed against his torso, and inhales violently when he moves to sit.

Reese snags the medical kit from under one of the bookshelves and drops beside him. By now the cushions are drooped practically to the floor. "Where?"

"Ribs." He frowns, considering. "My arm."

Reese flicks the buttons of his shirt open. Now he knows why he was breathing so shallowly. Reese's hands trip along his ribs, along the scattering of black-blue across his torso: nothing's broken, but the yellowing imprint of a fist leaves less room for gratefulness.

The gash on his arm doesn't help any either: it's bleeding sluggishly and jagged and long, although luckily nowhere near as deep.

Reese cuts the fabric away, pries it off as gently as he can. "You're going to need a new suit."

"I should think so."

Stitches. He's going to need stitches, too. Reese searches for the bottle of Lidocaine, locates a lamp at the foot of the coffee table. Kerosene-- the generator's downstairs, and this late they don't want to risk much more than a single gas lamp anyway. "Did they do this?"

"Not exactly," he says, eyes tracking the flicker of flame as the burner lights up. "They were dragging me through the warehouse. Must have caught my arm on something." There's an edge of incomprehension on his face. People, Reese has come to realize, are not so much the mystery to Finch, but the cruelty that they inflict; for all that he is no idealist, violence is not in Finch's nature, just as it is in Reese's.

He vetoes the Lidocaine. Reese makes a noise in his throat-- unsurprisingly, he's immovable in the face of Reese's disapproval.

That doesn't mean there's any satisfaction when he flinches as Reese presses an antiseptic-soaked rag over the gash; he doesn't make a sound when he pinches the edges of the skin together, or weaves the first stitch through. His body does pull in, go stiff, teeth clacking together as he grits them. Reese sets a rhythm that he thinks will be tolerable: not slow, not fast, and healing's never been so similar as hurting.

"Were you planning on mentioning this at some point?" he says, once he's broken the line of thread.

"You seemed busy."

In the end, Reese thinks he understands why Finch so frequently forgets his own relevance; times like now, it grates no less. He frowns at him.

"It slipped my mind," Finch murmurs. "I didn't even realize it was still bleeding until after you..."

Reese could say he'd do it again, and mean it; he could say there weren't any other options, and not. Neither explanation would mollify Finch, not when there's a rising body count in two burning warehouses tonight. "You knew they were coming," he says instead. "You knew and you deliberately didn't tell me your position was compromised."

"If I had, would you have gotten Mr. Bradley to safety first?" He reads the answer in Reese's silence. "I didn't think so."

"You got lucky they decided to question you first. If they hadn't you'd be dead."

"Longevity was never part of the plan. I told you that when we started all of this." Finch's eyes lift towards the needle, bright with a pinprick of red, before he glances away. "Surely you haven't forgotten."

"I haven't." Reese expects it to come out harsh, affronted-- instead he sounds bitter, bitter and weary and _sad,_ and hadn't he signed up for this suicide mission because it sounded like a good way to die?

Finch's expression hurts.

"Okay," he says, shoving off the hair plastered to his forehead in a ploy to hide his eyes, "Is there anything else I need to know about?"

He shakes his head. It's a brusque, too-sharp movement, and then he's reaching out, hands coming to hover above Reese's knees; his fingers flicker with aborted movement.

"I'm fine," Reese tells him. He freezes when Finch touches the corner of his jaw. His thumb flicks up to press lightly into the dip below Reese's cheekbone: only now does Reese register the deepening bruise there.

"I'm fine," he repeats, but now Finch's found the rip in Reese's suit.

"You said they missed."

"They did. Mostly."

"Another inch--"

"It wasn't another inch," he says, and something shifts in Finch's face. Shifts, and his hand is a reassuring, familiar weight on Reese's arm and there's ghost warmth left from his palm along his jaw, and Reese stops.

They have always kept things from each other. Yet of all the secrets they've had and still have, he never figured that this was one.

Finch pulls back. He gestures at their clothes, his torn sleeve puddling down about his elbow. "You mentioned something about a new suit? I believe it applies to both of us. Your arm--?"

"No," Reese says, doesn't recognize his own voice-- honestly, _honestly,_ he'd always thought it was just him. It's in the rules.

Finch rises gingerly. He's halfway down the hallway when Reese stands, when the words slip out without his volition: "You should have told me."

It's supposed to sound like an accusation: _who ever said they'd never lie to him?_ ; all it sounds is raw.

He turns, looking sorry and earnest as he had that first day near the Brooklyn Bridge, and says, "You wouldn't have been able to extricate us both from danger. If things had turned out differently... if you had had to make a decision and one of us hadn't made it back?-- you never would have stopped agonizing over it."

"You thought it would be better to make a decision that concerned both of us without telling me?"

"I thought it would be better not to force you to choose."

"You know I wouldn't have to."

Something flickers behind his eyes. "You of all people," he says evenly, "should understand that it is imperative not to allow personal emotion to compromise the mission."

Reese smiles, and it's wry, and it hurts at the edges. "You've been reading the Agency's handbook again, haven't you?"

His expression goes carefully blank. Reese's skin feels like live-wires: stripped bare and volatile.

"You should clean up," he says flatly. He's already turning away. "You'll find a spare suit in the filing cabinet on the second floor."

 

He stays on the sofa long after Finch's gone and far longer than he should. The fine-humming buzz of adrenaline had finally faded, leaving only bruises and scrapes, and the graze on his left arm.

It's that that finally prompts him forward. Beneath his ripped sleeve, it looks as deep as it feels-- on closer inspection, it's a shallow thing. When he's finished he hauls himself down a flight of stairs to find his spare set of clothes.

He changes quickly. It isn't until he tugs the coat out of the drawer that the stack of books near the back tumble forward.

Milton, and Dickinson, Carl Sagan and Roger Penrose and a battered dictionary; Ovid, Orpheus and Eurydice.

Reese, well. He knows this game.

He braces his back against the filing cabinet and slides down until he's sprawled onto the floor, and spreads the collection of titles out in front of him in search of clues.

Half an hour later-- no, an hour, he finds the page he's looking for. It is, unsurprisingly, where he least expected it.

**Categorical imperative** _: noun: a moral obligation or command that is unconditionally and universally binding._

Reese shuts the dictionary and goes to find Finch.

 

He's storing away the medical kit.

Reese lingers in the doorway. Watches him, gilded in lamplight and backed by shadows, and even now there is an economy to his movements that is unerringly himself.

Reese knows himself, too. He knows himself, and he knows inevitability: he suspects they were always going to end up here. He hadn't known it in the beginning and he hadn't known it for a long time after, but he knows it now.

He speaks from behind him. "You and I need to come to an accord, Harold."

His hands still. "Do we?" he asks, all feigned innocence, and there is steel in his voice.

Reese skirts the shadows till he comes around the edge of the sofa. "You," he starts, and his breath twists violently in his throat. He's crowding him again without meaning to; now he's on his knees. Even with Finch on that (battered, sagging) sofa they remain eye to eye.

"Mr. Reese," Finch starts, and there it is, back to those prim defenses he'd used from the start. This is Finch, though, who sees-- well, not _all_ the possibilities, he isn't his Machine-- but he sees enough, and Reese wonders how long ago Finch had expected this to happen, how many trip wires he'd prevented them from crossing simply because he'd planned for them.

Reese finds purchase on his shoulders. Fingers crumpling clean fabric that, beneath, still smells of rainwater and blood-- and no one, not even the Machine, sees enough to prevent all the traps.

Finch never moves. His eyes flit to Reese's hands, then back to his face. "We have a mission," he says.

"It was you," Reese manages. "It was always going to be you."

Finch blinks, blinks again, and his hand slowly curls around the nape of Reese's neck.

 

"This was not what I had intended to do," he says quietly, as they lie face-to-face on threadbare cushions.

Reese isn't sure if he's referring to the duration of their partnership or only now, when he'd urged him level with him on the sofa, or slid his palm across Reese's chest in a warm vertical track, or Reese'd drawn him down.

He forgoes the long-term in favor of immediacy. "But you stayed," he says.

Absently, Finch touches the dictionary that lies to the side, rubs restlessly at the pages. "Do you know-- do you know the first life the Machine ever saved was mine?

"I built its foundation on a single directive: _all human life should be protected_. I didn't learn until later that it had recoded itself. It had begun to _alter_ its imperative. Begun prioritizing my life over everyone else's. As you can imagine, that was entirely unacceptable."

"I'm not your Machine, Finch."

"No. Yet like It, you care far more than you should."

His reluctance is a palpable thing. "Kara," Reese says, "told me that the quickest way to get killed was to get invested."

"Truer words," he murmurs.

"We're both still here."

"You're not an optimist, and I've tempted Fate once before."

"More of one than you. And if you think we haven't been tempting Fate since we started this..."

His face hollows into sharp, hunted lines; he squeezes his eyes shut.

Reese swipes his thumb across his cheekbone. When he doesn't pull away, he kisses the junction of his collarbone, works his way up the pale column of his neck. He feels the subtle shift when Finch begins to tilt into them, and finally the muted, humid warmth as their mouths meet.

 

"Finch?" Reese asks.

He hums dismissively, huffing something into his shoulder.

Reese strokes down the line of his back, at the bone-deep ache HR and the running must've left. "Would you have--?" He stops, can't quite ask it.

Finch draws back, enough for Reese to see his eyes. He knows what Reese is asking.

The confession is in Finch's silence.

Reese needs to protest: they've got a _job_ to do, and the Agency taught him one or two things worth remembering, imperatives included-- then again, he's made it clear he'll come down on the same side, and he's many things but he's not a hypocrite. (He is not Finch's Machine, either, or Finch's creation. He isn't Kara's or Snow's and he isn't a liar or a spy and he is only subtle when he wants to be.)

Finch's fingers curl in the hair at the nape of Reese's neck. "Go to sleep," he says sternly, and Reese does.

 

He wakes gradually, to the rumble of traffic and dull bluish light and deft fingers, carding through his hair.

He nuzzles in along his collarbone without opening his eyes. "Morning," he says.

"I feel as if I should object."

Reese lifts his head to find his legs tangled around Finch's, his arm locked around his waist and a hand curled over the rise of his hip, and Reese might've been accused of being a koala once or twice in his life.

He hides his smile in the crook of Finch's neck.

Finch sighs, and it is exasperated and it is disapproving and Reese?-- Reese knows better. "I suppose I have no say in this?" he asks, and his fingers slide again through Reese's hair, and he doesn't seem inclined to stop.

"None," John confirms, unequivocally.

 


End file.
